Karl Popper – The Open Society and its Enemies (1945)
(Plato’s totalitarianism)
The analysis of Plato’s sociology makes it easy to present his political programme. His fundamental
demands can be either of two formulas, the first corresponding to his idealist theory of change and
rest, the second to his naturalism. The idealist formula is: Arrest all political change! Change is evil,
rest divine. All change can be arrested if the state is made an exact copy of its original, i.e. of the
Form or Idea of the city. Should it be asked how this is practicable, we can reply with the naturalistic
formula: Back to nature! Back to the original state of our forefathers, the primitive state founded in
accordance with human nature, and therefore stable; back to the tribal patriarchy of the time before
the Fall, to the natural class rule of the wise few over the ignorant many. I believe that practically all
the elements of Plato’s political programme can be derived from these demands. They are, in turn,
based upon his historicism; and they have to be combined with his sociological doctrines concerning
the conditions for the stability of class rule. The principal elements I have in mind are:
(A) The strict division of the classes; i.e. the ruling class consisting of herdsmen and watch-dogs must
be strictly separated from the human cattle.
(B) The identification of the fate of the state with that of the ruling class; the exclusive interest in this
class, and in its unity; and subservient to this unity, the rigid rules for breeding and educating this
class, and the strict supervision and collectivization of the interests of its members.
From these principal elements, others can be derived, for instance the following:
(C) The ruling class has a monopoly of things like military virtues and training, and of the right to
carry arms and to receive education of any kind; but it is excluded from any participation in economic
activities, and especially from earning money.
(D) There must be a censorship of all intellectual activities of the ruling class, and a continual
propaganda aiming at moulding and unifying their minds. All innovation in education, legislation, and
religion must be prevented or suppressed.
(E) The state must be self-sufficient. It must aim at economic autarchy; for otherwise the rulers
would either be dependent upon traders, or become traders themselves. The first of these
alternatives would undermine their power, the second their unity and the stability of the state.
This programme can, I think, be fairly described as totalitarian.
(Plato’s ‘Justice’)
[…] What do we really mean when we speak of ‘Justice’? I do not think that verbal questions of this
kind are particularly important, or that it is possible to make a definite answer to them, since such
terms are always used in various senses. However, I think that most of us, especially those whose
general outlook is humanitarian, mean something like this: (a) an equal distribution of the burden of
citizenship, i.e. of those limitations of freedom which are necessary in social life4 ; (b) equal
treatment of the citizens before the law, provided, of course, that (c) the laws show neither favour
nor disfavour towards individual citizens or groups or classes; (d) impartiality of the courts of justice;
and (e) an equal share in the advantages (and not only in the burden) which membership of the state
may offer to its citizens. If Plato had meant by ‘justice’ anything of this kind, then my claim that his
programme is purely totalitarian would certainly be wrong and all those would be right who believe
that Plato’s politics rested upon an acceptable humanitarian basis. But the fact is that he meant by
‘justice’ something entirely different. What did Plato mean by ‘justice’? I assert that in the Republic
he used the term ‘just’ as a synonym for ‘that which is in the interest of the best state’. And what is
in the interest of this best state? To arrest all change, by the maintenance of a rigid class division and
class rule.
[…] The city is founded upon human nature, its needs, and its limitations. ‘We have stated, and, you
will remember, repeated over and over again that each man in our city should do one work only;
namely, that work for which his nature is naturally best fitted.’ From this Plato concludes that
everyone should mind his own business, that the carpenter should confine himself to carpentering,
the shoemaker to making shoes. Not much harm is done, however, if two workers change their
natural places. ‘But should anyone who is by nature a worker (or else a member of the moneyearning class)… manage to get into the warrior class; or should a warrior get into the class of the
guardians, without being worthy of it... then this kind of change and of underhand plotting would
mean the downfall of the city.’ From this argument which is closely related to the principle that the
carrying of arms should be a class prerogative, Plato draws his final conclusion that any changing or
intermingling within the three classes must be injustice, and that the opposite, therefore, is justice:
‘When each class in the city minds its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries
and the guardians, then this will be justice.’ This conclusion is reaffirmed and summed up a little
later: ‘The city is just... if each of its three classes attends to its own work.’ But this statement means
that Plato identifies justice with the principle of class rule and of class privilege. For the principle that
every class should attend to its own business means, briefly and bluntly, that the state is just if the
ruler rules, if the worker works, and7 if the slave slaves. It will be seen that Plato’s concept of justice
is fundamentally different from our ordinary view as analysed above. Plato calls class privilege ‘just’,
while we usually mean by justice rather the absence of such privilege. But the difference goes further
than that. We mean by justice some kind of equality in the treatment of individuals, while Plato
considers justice not as a relationship between individuals, but as a property of the whole state,
based upon a relationship between its classes. The state is just if it is healthy, strong, united—stable
[…]
(The principle of leadership)
The wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow. — PLATO.
[…] We have seen that Plato’s idea of justice demands, fundamentally, that the natural rulers should
rule and the natural slaves should slave. It is part of the historicist demand that the state, in order to
arrest all change, should be a copy of its Idea, or of its true ‘nature’. This theory of justice indicates
very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the
state?
It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or
‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy […] It
is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the
best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General
Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as
it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born
slave’?—is, as I shall try to show, quite useless. First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that
some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory
from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely
skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those
who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or
‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to
get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we
must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad
government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this
leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who
should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or
incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?
Those who believe that the older question is fundamental, tacitly assume that political power is
‘essentially’ unchecked. They assume that someone has the power—either an individual or a
collective body, such as a class. And they assume that he who has the power can, very nearly, do
what he wills, and especially that he can strengthen his power, and thereby approximate it further to
an unlimited or unchecked power. They assume that political power is, essentially, sovereign. If this
assumption is made, then, indeed, the question ‘Who is to be the sovereign?’ is the only important
question left.
I shall call this assumption the theory of (unchecked) sovereignty, using this expression not for any
particular one of the various theories of sovereignty, proffered more especially by such writers as
Bodin, Rousseau, or Hegel, but for the more general assumption that political power is practically
unchecked, or for the demand that it ought to be so; together with the implication that the main
question left is to get this power into the best hands. This theory of sovereignty is tacitly assumed in
Plato’s approach, and has played its role ever since. It is also implicitly assumed, for instance, by
those modern writers who believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or
the workers?
[…] Returning to Plato, we find that by his emphasis upon the problem ‘who should rule’, he
implicitly assumed the general theory of sovereignty. The question of an institutional control of the
rulers, and of an institutional balancing of their powers, is thereby eliminated without ever having
been raised. The interest is shifted from institutions to questions of personnel, and the most urgent
problem now becomes that of selecting the natural leaders, and that of training them for leadership.
(Plato and Socrates)
[…] The Platonic ‘Socrates’ of the Republic is the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism.
(Even his self-deprecating remarks are not based upon awareness of his limitations, but are rather an
ironical way of asserting his superiority.) His educational aim is not the awakening of self-criticism
and of critical thought in general. It is, rather, indoctrination—the moulding of minds and of souls
which (to repeat a quotation from the Laws) are ‘to become, by long habit, utterly incapable of doing
anything at all independently’. And Socrates’ great equalitarian and liberating idea that it is possible
to reason with a slave, and that there is an intellectual link between man and man, a medium of
universal understanding, namely, ‘reason’, this idea is replaced by a demand for an educational
monopoly of the ruling class, coupled with the strictest censorship, even of oral debates
Socrates had stressed that he was not wise; that he was not in the possession of truth, but that he
was a searcher, an inquirer, a lover of truth. This, he explained, is expressed by the word
‘philosopher’, i.e. the lover of wisdom, and the seeker for it, as opposed to ‘Sophist’, i.e. the
professionally wise man. If ever he claimed that statesmen should be philosophers, he could only
have meant that, burdened with an excessive responsibility, they should be searchers for truth, and
conscious of their limitations.
How did Plato convert this doctrine? At first sight, it might appear that he did not alter it at all, when
demanding that the sovereignty of the state should be invested in the philosophers; especially since,
like Socrates, he defined philosophers as lovers of truth. But the change made by Plato is indeed
tremendous. His lover is no longer the modest seeker, he is the proud possessor of truth. A trained
dialectician, he is capable of intellectual intuition, i.e. of seeing, and of communicating with, the
eternal, the heavenly Forms or Ideas. Placed high above all ordinary men, he is ‘godlike, if not ...
divine’, both in his wisdom and in his power. Plato’s ideal philosopher approaches both to
omniscience and to omnipotence. He is the Philosopher-King. It is hard, I think, to conceive a greater
contrast than that between the Socratic and the Platonic ideal of a philosopher. It is the contrast
between two worlds—the world of a modest, rational individualist and that of a totalitarian demigod.
(Truth and Government)
The contrast between the Platonic and the Socratic creed is even greater than I have shown so far.
Plato, I have said, followed Socrates in his definition of the philosopher. ‘Whom do you call true
philosophers?—Those who love truth’, we read in the Republic. But he himself is not quite truthful
when he makes this statement. He does not really believe in it, for he bluntly declares in other places
that it is one of the royal privileges of the sovereign to make full use of lies and deceit: ‘It is the
business of the rulers of the city, if it is anybody’s, to tell lies, deceiving both its enemies and its own
citizens for the benefit of the city; and no one else must touch this privilege.’ ‘For the benefit of the
city’, says Plato. Again we find that the appeal to the principle of collective utility is the ultimate
ethical consideration. Totalitarian morality overrules everything, even the definition, the Idea, of the
philosopher. It need hardly be mentioned that, by the same principle of political expediency, the
ruled are to be forced to tell the truth. ‘If the ruler catches anyone else in a lie... then he will punish
him for introducing a practice which injures and endangers the city ...’ Only in this slightly
unexpected sense are the Platonic rulers—the philosopher kings— lovers of truth.
Plato illustrates this application of his principle of collective utility to the problem of truthfulness by
the example of the physician. The example is well chosen, since Plato likes to visualize his political
mission as one of the healer or saviour of the sick body of society. Apart from this, the role which he
assigns to medicine throws light upon the totalitarian character of Plato’s city where state interest
dominates the life of the citizen from the mating of his parents to his grave. Plato interprets medicine
as a form of politics, or as he puts it himself, he ‘regards Aesculapius, the god of medicine, as a
politician’. Medical art, he explains, must not consider the prolongation of life as its aim, but only the
interest of the state. ‘In all properly ruled communities, each man has his particular work assigned to
him in the state. This he must do, and no one has time to spend his life in falling ill and getting cured.’
Accordingly, the physician has ‘no right to attend to a man who cannot carry out his ordinary duties;
for such a man is useless to himself and to the state’. To this is added the consideration that such
man might have ‘children who would probably be equally sick’, and who also would become a
burden to the state […] Concerning the use of lies and deceit, Plato urges that these are ‘useful only
as a medicine’; but the ruler of the state, Plato insists, must not behave like some of those ‘ordinary
doctors’ who have not the courage to administer strong medicines. The philosopher king, a lover of
truth as a philosopher, must, as a king, be ‘a more courageous man’, since he must be determined ‘to
administer a great many lies and deceptions’—for the benefit of the ruled, Plato hastens to add.
Which means, as we already know, and as we learn here again from Plato’s reference to medicine,
‘for the benefit of the state’ […]
What kind of lies has Plato in mind when he exhorts his rulers to use strong medicine? Grossman
rightly emphasizes that Plato means ‘propaganda, the technique of controlling the behaviour of... the
bulk of the ruled majority’. Certainly, Plato had these first in his mind; but when Grossman suggests
that the propaganda lies were only intended for the consumption of the ruled, while the rulers
should be a fully enlightened intelligentsia, then I cannot agree. I think, rather, that Plato’s complete
break with anything resembling Socrates’ intellectualism is nowhere more obvious than in the place
where he twice expresses his hope that even the rulers themselves, at least after a few generations,
might be induced to believe his greatest propaganda lie; I mean his racialism, his Myth of Blood and
Soil, known as the Myth of the Metals in Man and of the Earthborn. Here we see that Plato’s
utilitarian and totalitarian principles overrule everything, even the ruler’s privilege of knowing, and of
demanding to be told, the truth. The motive of Plato’s wish that the rulers themselves should believe
in the propaganda lie is his hope of increasing its wholesome effect, i.e. of strengthening the rule of
the master race, and ultimately, of arresting all political change.
Plato introduces his Myth of Blood and Soil with the blunt admission that it is a fraud. ‘Well then’,
says the Socrates of the Republic, ‘could we perhaps fabricate one of those very handy lies which
indeed we mentioned just recently? With the help of one single lordly lie we may, if we are lucky,
persuade even the rulers themselves—but at any rate the rest of the city.’ It is interesting to note the
use of the term ‘persuade’. To persuade somebody to believe a lie means, more precisely, to mislead
or to hoax him; and it would be more in tune with the frank cynicism of the passage to translate ‘we
may, if we are lucky, hoax even the rulers themselves’. But Plato uses the term ‘persuasion’ very
frequently, and its occurrence here throws some light on other passages. It may be taken as a
warning that in similar passages he may have propaganda lies in his mind; more especially where he
advocates that the statesman should rule ‘by means of both persuasion and force’.
[…] ‘Then came, it seems, that wise and cunning man, The first inventor of the fear of gods ... He
framed a tale, a most alluring doctrine, Concealing truth by veils of lying lore. He told of the abode of
awful gods, Up in revolving vaults, whence thunder roars And lightning’s fearful flashes blind the eye
... He thus encircled men by bonds of fear; Surrounding them by gods in fair abodes, He charmed
them by his spells, and daunted them—And lawlessness turned into law and order.’ In Critias’ view,
religion is nothing but the lordly lie of a great and clever statesman. Plato’s views are strikingly
similar, both in the introduction of the Myth in the Republic (where he bluntly admits that the Myth
is a lie) and in the Laws where he says that the installation of rites and of gods is ‘a matter for a great
thinker’ […] Thus Plato demands, in the Laws, the severest punishment even for honest and
honourable people if their opinions concerning the gods deviate from those held by the state. Their
souls are to be treated by a Nocturnal Council of inquisitors, and if they do not recant or if they
repeat the offence, the charge of impiety means death. Has he forgotten that Socrates had fallen a
victim to that very charge?
That it is mainly state interest which inspires these demands, rather than interest in the religious
faith as such, is indicated by Plato’s central religious doctrine. The gods, he teaches in the Laws,
punish severely all those on the wrong side in the conflict between good and evil, a conflict which is
explained as that between collectivism and individualism. And the gods, he insists, take an active
interest in men, they are not merely spectators. It is impossible to appease them. Neither through
prayers nor through sacrifices can they be moved to abstain from punishment. The political interest
behind this teaching is clear, and it is made even clearer by Plato’s demand that the state must
suppress all doubt about any part of this politico-religious dogma, and especially about the doctrine
that the gods never abstain from punishment.
It is interesting, however, to note that Plato’s theory of truth is slightly less radical than his theory of
justice. Justice, we have seen, is defined, practically, as that which serves the interest of his
totalitarian state. It would have been possible, of course, to define the concept of truth in the same
utilitarian or pragmatist fashion. The Myth is true, Plato could have said, since anything that serves
the interest of my state must be believed and therefore must be called ‘true’; and there must be no
other criterion of truth […] But Plato retained enough of the Socratic spirit to admit candidly that he
was lying.
(The ‘good’)
[…] Plato’s Idea of the Good is the highest in the hierarchy of Forms. It is the sun of the divine world
of Forms or Ideas, which not only sheds light on all the other members, but is the source of their
existence. It is also the source or cause of all knowledge and all truth. The power of seeing, of
appreciating, of knowing the Good is thus indispensable to the dialectician. Since it is the sun and the
source of light in the world of Forms, it enables the philosopher-painter to discern his objects. Its
function is therefore of the greatest importance for the founder of the city. But this purely formal
information is all we get. Plato’s Idea of the Good nowhere plays a more direct ethical or political
role; never do we hear which deeds are good, or produce good, apart from the well-known
collectivist moral code whose precepts are introduced without recourse to the Idea of Good.
Remarks that the Good is the aim, that it is desired by every man, do not enrich our information. This
empty formalism is still more marked in the Philebus, where the Good is identified with the Idea of
‘measure’ or ‘mean’. And when I read the report that Plato, in his famous lecture ‘On the Good’,
disappointed an uneducated audience by defining the Good as ‘the class of the determinate
conceived as a unity’, then my sympathy is with the audience. In the Republic, Plato says frankly that
he cannot explain what he means by ‘the Good’. The only practical suggestion we ever get is the one
mentioned at the beginning of chapter 4—that good is everything that preserves, and evil everything
that leads to corruption or degeneration. (‘Good’ does not, however, seem to be here the Idea of
Good, but rather a property of things which makes them resemble the ideas.) Good is, accordingly,
an unchanging, an arrested state of things; it is the state of things at rest.
(Plato’s utopianism)
Inherent in Plato’s programme there is a certain approach towards politics which, I believe, is most
dangerous. Its analysis is of great practical importance from the point of view of rational social
engineering. The Platonic approach I have in mind can be described as that of Utopian engineering,
as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I consider as the only rational one, and which
may be described by the name of piecemeal engineering.
The Utopian approach is the more dangerous as it may seem to be the obvious alternative to an outand-out historicism—to a radically historicist approach which implies that we cannot alter the course
of history; at the same time, it appears to be a necessary complement to a less radical historicism,
like that of Plato, which permits human interference. The Utopian approach may be described as
follows. Any rational action must have a certain aim. It is rational in the same degree as it pursues its
aim consciously and consistently, and as it determines its means according to this end. To choose the
end is therefore the first thing we have to do if we wish to act rationally; and we must be careful to
determine our real or ultimate ends, from which we must distinguish clearly those intermediate or
partial ends which actually are only means, or steps on the way, to the ultimate end. If we neglect
this distinction, then we must also neglect to ask whether these partial ends are likely to promote
the ultimate end, and accordingly, we must fail to act rationally. These principles, if applied to the
realm of political activity, demand that we must determine our ultimate political aim, or the Ideal
State, before taking any practical action. Only when this ultimate aim is determined, in rough outline
at least, only when we are in possession of something like a blueprint of the society at which we aim,
only then can we begin to consider the best ways and means for its realization, and to draw up a plan
for practical action. These are the necessary preliminaries of any practical political move that can be
called rational, and especially of social engineering.
This, in brief, is the methodological approach which I call Utopian engineering. It is convincing and
attractive. In fact, it is just the kind of methodological approach to attract all those who are either
unaffected by historicist prejudices or reacting against them. This makes it only the more dangerous,
and its criticism the more imperative. Before proceeding to criticize Utopian engineering in detail, I
wish to outline another approach to social engineering, namely, that of piecemeal engineering. It is
an approach which I think to be methodologically sound. The politician who adopts this method may
or may not have a blueprint of society before his mind, he may or may not hope that mankind will
one day realize an ideal state, and achieve happiness and perfection on earth. But he will be aware
that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant, and that every generation of men, and therefore
also the living, have a claim; perhaps not so much a claim to be made happy, for there are no
institutional means of making a man happy, but a claim not to be made unhappy, where it can be
avoided. They have a claim to be given all possible help, if they suffer. The piecemeal engineer will,
accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent
evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good. This difference
is far from being merely verbal. In fact, it is most important. It is the difference between a reasonable
method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an
intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied
at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually
postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favourable. And it is also the
difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at
any time, and in any place (Russia included, as will be seen), and a method which, wherever it has
been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment,
at any rate to that of its original blueprint.
In favour of his method, the piecemeal engineer can claim that a systematic fight against suffering
and injustice and war is more likely to be supported by the approval and agreement of a great
number of people than the fight for the establishment of some ideal. The existence of social evils,
that is to say, of social conditions under which many men are suffering, can be comparatively well
established. Those who suffer can judge for themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they
would not like to change places. It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social
life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on
the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind
of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this,
blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single
institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or antidepression budgeting, or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a
re-adjustment not very difficult. They are less risky, and for this very reason less controversial. But if
it is easier to reach a reasonable agreement about existing evils and the means of combating them
than it is about an ideal good and the means of its realization, then there is also more hope that by
using the piecemeal method we may get over the very greatest practical difficulty of all reasonable
political reform, namely, the use of reason, instead of passion and violence, in executing the
programme. There will be a possibility of reaching a reasonable compromise and therefore of
achieving the improvement by democratic methods. (‘Compromise’ is an ugly word, but it is
important for us to learn its proper use. Institutions are inevitably the result of a compromise with
circumstances, interests, etc., though as persons we should resist influences of this kind.)
As opposed to that, the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a
whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead
to a dictatorship. This I consider a criticism of the Utopian approach; for I have tried to show, in the
chapter on the Principle of Leadership, that an authoritarian rule is a most objectionable form of
government. Some points not touched upon in that chapter furnish us with even more direct
arguments against the Utopian approach. One of the difficulties faced by a benevolent dictator is to
find whether the effects of his measures agree with his good intentions (as de Tocqueville saw clearly
more than a hundred years ago). The difficulty arises out of the fact that authoritarianism must
discourage criticism; accordingly, the benevolent dictator will not easily hear of complaints
concerning the measures he has taken. But without some such check, he can hardly find out whether
his measures achieve the desired benevolent aim. The situation must become even worse for the
Utopian engineer. The reconstruction of society is a big undertaking which must cause considerable
inconvenience to many, and for a considerable span of time. Accordingly, the Utopian engineer will
have to be deaf to many complaints; in fact, it will be part of his business to suppress unreasonable
objections. (He will say, like Lenin, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’). But
with it, he must invariably suppress reasonable criticism also.
Giorgio de Chirico - The Evil Genius of a King (1914–15)